Although the worldwide response to COVID-19 is likely go down as one of the dumbest reactions to a problem in modern history, one silver lining from that fiasco may have been the realization that most of today’s white-collar work can be done remotely. By forcing companies to shut down, employers quickly developed ways of conducting virtual meetings, objectively assessing employees on their productivity, and reevaluating which in-person positions are still necessary.

As the world reopened, and people began to realize that the lockdowns were both counterproductive and based on junk science, a larger debate emerged about whether it would be wise to bring employees back to the office and return to pre-COVID norms or continue the remote-work revolution that started half a decade ago.

On one side are those who argue for the overall necessity of an employee’s physical presence. Responding to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s demand for allowing members of Congress to work and vote remotely, The Blaze columnist Christopher Bedford insists that most work can’t be done remotely: “Making life easier … will mean we can’t always bend the realities and duties of every job and every service to our needs… something’s got to give.” In Luna’s case, as with most public servants, it matters that they are accessible and accountable for their work, and this is difficult to establish when they are working off-site.

On the other side are those who argue that much of the insistence on keeping employees in the office is based on an outdated view that refuses to recognize the ways new digital technology has largely resolved the challenges of remote work. Managers can communicate through a variety of ways and have group meetings through a multitude of platforms, none of which require in-person meetings.

Such is the argument in a recent essay by a writer who goes by Person Online. Citing personal experience and common sense, he claims the overriding impulse among RTO (return to office) advocates stems from Baby Boomer prejudice: “Anti-telework employers want to own your time. In the boomer no-telework worldview, employment is a contract in which you sell your time to your employer. What you actually do with that time is of secondary concern.”

Because they have grown up in the pre-internet era, older workers are conditioned to equate time spent with work done. Whether a person dressed in business casual clothing spends 8 hours at his desk playing Angry Birds or 8 hours creating spreadsheets and answering emails, it is still 8 hours of solid work for a manager who may not understand how computers work and therefore judges people by superficial criteria. This is why he will simultaneously assume the worst of a remote worker, even if that remote worker accomplishes far more than his on-site colleagues.

Moreover, if the reasoning behind the shift to remote work is accepted, then the whole configuration of today’s workplaces may change significantly. There will be little need for poorly lit office towers filled with colorless cubicles and conference rooms. Corporations will be decentralized, allowing managers and subordinates to do their work from anyplace in the world that has an internet connection. After over-spending so many decades on Kafkaesque offices (depicted so well in the television series Severance), the modern white-collar worker can finally be liberated from a soul-sucking system riddled with redundancies, contradictions, and outright stupidity.

But it’s not just the workplace that will be affected. This continuing evolution in work situations will have significant ripple effects in other spheres of life, specifically in my own world of education. Beyond the shifting demographics that will come from the population growth in the suburbs and exurbs and a continued hollowing out of the urban centers, the remote work revolution will compel educators to redefine schooling in light of what is possible with today’s technology.

No, this doesn’t mean making schooling remote, which was a disaster from which all of us are still recovering. And no, it also doesn’t mean squandering billions by pushing “digital literacy” and issuing iPads to every student. We learned the hard way that when left to their own literal devices at home, most students will dedicate their time to watching YouTube, scrolling through social media, and playing video games instead of keeping up with Zoom classes and taking quizzes on glitchy online education platforms.

Instead, the American education system needs to disavow the mindset that time spent equates  learning accomplished. This core principle has captivated K-12 schools (in the negative and literal sense that it has held teachers and students captive) since the days of Horace Mann. The notion is so deeply ingrained that most people truly believe the main point of school is to keep butts in seats and ensure 8+ hours of instruction every day for 180 days each year.

Even more than the bureaucratic workplace of yore, schools are  sterile, regulated environments that organized around the principle of educators “owning” students’ time. As Person Online says about white-collar work, what children or their teachers do with that time at school (e.g., master a foreign language, solve math problems, analyze a poem, etc.) “is secondary”; what is most important is that students spend their time in a classroom and not somewhere else.

This is why most educational reformers prefer to talk about rising graduation rates and doling out ever more diplomas and shun conversation about widespread grade inflation or declining test scores. The former metric only shows that kids are spending more time at school while the latter proves that what they are doing with all that time is mostly wasting it.

But what if we prioritized authentic learning over keeping kids chained to their desks? What if we taught and assessed students based on what they know and not on how much boredom and busy work they can endure? What if teachers could spend more of their time lecturing and grading instead of managing restless students from bell to bell? What if education was based on the humanizing idea of leisure, time devoted to learning and reflection, instead of the mechanizing idea of industry, time devoted to activity and production? After all, the word school is derived from the Greek word for leisure, skole.

True, students might still spend most of the day at school—so they can socialize with their peers, learn from their teachers, be part of a community, and have adult supervision while their parents work. However, even in this situation, they would have more time to review concepts, read, and practice skills on their own instead of being subjected to so many consecutive hours of forced instruction. It would be a cross between a college and a Montessori school where classes are done before lunch and the students are free for the rest of the day.

This would fundamentally change the nature of formal schooling for the better. All the drudgery that has persisted throughout the decades would dissolve, freeing students to realize their potential excellence as autonomous human beings, not face periodic judgment for how well they resemble compliant automatons.

Before COVID, envisioning school in this way would have been an idle fantasy. Now, however, this isn’t just fantasy, but eminently possible. If we can imagine education occurring outside the narrow confines of a classroom, we can consider the kind of schooling that enables such a process.

Moreover, with more states adopting school choice measures by opening more charter schools and enabling educational savings accounts (an updated version of school vouchers), a school model that does not equate instructional time with learning will become a necessary innovation in order to successfully compete for student enrollment. Given the choice, most remote workers would like to keep their freedom; similarly, given the opportunity, most students would like the freedom required for real learning to begin with.

And, speaking as a teacher myself, I would welcome such a change. As the poet William Wordsworth memorably said, “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Our schools are wrongly based on the model of the old workplace where work and learning are necessarily cast as dull and burdensome. As such, we “lay waste our powers,” with teachers pretending to teach, students pretending to learn, and administrators pretending to lead.

We can only trade this illusion for a new reality once we dispense with this old model and adopt a new liberal one. Such a liberalized school might not be something that today’s adults would understand as a place of formal learning, but that is only because it would make better use of time, foster more creativity and deeper learning, and respect students’ independence.

As with white-collar work, it’s time to let go of hidebound concepts and embrace a new paradigm that is more open, freer, and respectful of the human person. Once we do this, school will finally live up its original purpose and so many of the problems plaguing American schools can finally be eliminated.